Farther Away : Essays

LOVE LETTERS

[encomium to James Purdy on the occasion of his receiving the Center for Fiction’s Fadiman Award for Eustace Chisholm and the Works]

I don’t know if anyone here remembers last year’s college football game between Stanford and the University of California. But just to remind you: Stanford had a much smaller and weaker team with, like, a 2–7 record, but during the first half of the game it looked as if Stanford might actually beat Cal, because its defense was so pumped up that its players had entirely lost their fear of injury. There were young men running at full speed, as hard as they could, with their arms open wide, and flinging themselves against stronger young men who were running just as hard in the opposite direction. There were spectacular, gruesome collisions — it was like seeing people run full tilt into telephone poles — and sickening numbers of Stanford players were getting seriously hurt and carted off the field, and still they just kept flinging themselves at Cal. The experience of watching their doomed effort, these repeated joyous, self-destroying collisions of young people who desperately wanted something, all of this chaos in the context of a larger suspenseful, formally gorgeous game whose outcome was nonetheless pretty well foreordained: I haven’t been able to find a better analog for the experience of reading Eustace Chisholm and the Works.

Mr. Purdy’s novel is so good that almost any novel you read immediately after it will seem at least a little bit posturing, or dishonest, or self-admiring, in comparison. Certainly, for example, The Catcher in the Rye, which Mr. Purdy once described as “one of the worst books ever written,” will betray its sentimentality and rhetorical manipulations as it never has before. Richard Yates, whose ferocity sometimes approaches Mr. Purdy’s, might do a little better, but you’d have to wipe away every vestige of Yates’s self-pity and replace it with headlong love; you’d have to ramp Yates’s depression up into a fatalism of such bleakness that it becomes ecstatic. Even Saul Bellow, whose love of language and love of the world can be so infectious, is liable to seem wordy and academic and show-offy if you read him directly after Eustace Chisholm. One of the darker chapters in Augie March ends with Augie accompanying his friend Mimi to the office of a South Side abortionist. While Bellow draws a curtain over what happens inside this doctor’s office, Mr. Purdy in Eustace Chisholm delivers — famously, unforgettably — on the horror. (It is an unbelievable scene.) The extreme margins of the stable, familiar world of Saul Bellow (and of most novelists, including me) are at the extreme normal end of Mr. Purdy’s world. He takes up where the rest of us leave off. He follows his queer boys and struggling artists and dissolute millionaires to places like

This out-of-the-way ice-cream parlor near the state line, a favorite stop for truck drivers hauling smuggled merchandise, ladies committing adultery with local building and loan directors, where a preacher was shot to death by a widow who was losing his love, where the local fairies used to come late afternoons…

and he instills these locales with a weird kind of Gemütlichkeit. You miss having been there yourself the way you miss having ridden on a sleigh with Natasha Rostov. Near the end of Eustace Chisholm, two characters walk out onto the rocks piled up alongside Lake Michigan:

They sat down there, remembering how less desperate and much happier, after all, they had used to feel when they sat here the year before, and yet how desperate they had been then too. A few gulls hovered near some refuse floating on the oil-stained water.

What constitutes in extremis for most of us is the daily bread of Mr. Purdy’s world. He lets you try on desperation, and you find that it fits you better than you expected. His most bizarre freaks don’t feel freakish. They feel, peculiarly, like me. I read about the humiliation and incest and self-loathing and self-destruction in Eustace Chisholm with the same lively, sympathetic, and morally clear-eyed interest with which I follow the broken engagements and bruised feelings in Jane Austen. You can be sure, when you begin a Purdy novel, that all will most certainly not end well, and it’s his great gift to narrate the inexorable progress toward disaster in such a way that it’s as satisfying and somehow life-affirming as progress toward a happy ending. And when Purdy finally does, as in the last three pages of Eustace Chisholm, toss you a tiny scrap of ordinary hope and happiness, you may very well begin to weep out of sheer gratitude. It’s as if the book is set up, almost in spite of itself, to make you feel what a miracle it is that love is ever requited, that two compatible people ever find their way to each other. You’ve so reconciled yourself to the disaster, you’ve been so thoroughly sold on his fatalistic vision, that a moment of ordinary peace and kindness feels like an act of divine grace.

Mr. Purdy shouldn’t be confused with his late contemporary, William Burroughs, or with Burroughs’s many transgressive successors. Transgressive literature is always, secretly or not so secretly, addressing itself to the bourgeois world that it depends on. As a reader of transgressive fiction, you have two choices: either you can be shocked, or you can shock other people with your failure to be shocked. Although Mr. Purdy, in his public utterances, is implacably hostile to American society, in his fiction he directs his attention inward. There isn’t one sentence in Eustace Chisholm that could care less about whether some reader is shocked by it. The book’s eponymous nonhero— a cruel, arrogant, freeloading, bisexual poet who is writing an epic poem of modern America with a charcoal pencil on sheets of old newspapers — is an obsessive reader of the letters and diaries of other people:

Unlike small towns, cities contain transient persons… who carry their letters about with them carelessly, either losing them or throwing them away. Most passers-by would not bother to stoop down and pick up such a letter because they would assume there would be nothing in the contents to interest or detain them. This was not true of Eustace. He pored over found letters whose messages were not meant for him. To him they were like treasures that spoke fully. Paradise to Eustace might have been reading the love-letters of every writer, no matter how inconsequential or even illiterate, who had written a real one. What made the pursuit exciting was to come on that rare thing: the authentic, naked, unconcealed voice of love.

Chisholm eventually becomes so addicted to other people’s real-life stories that he abandons his own work and devotes his attention entirely to the book’s central love: a crazy, unconsummated relationship between a young former coal miner, Daniel Haws, and a beautiful blond country boy named Amos Ratliffe. Purdy is a vastly bigger and tougher and more protean figure than his creation Chisholm — he is the author of forty-six books of fiction, poetry, and drama — but, as an author, he is palpably driven by the same kind of helpless fascination and identification with human suffering. However high Mr. Purdy’s authorial opinion of himself may be, however much of a son of a bitch he may appear in his public pronouncements, when he sits down to tell a story he somehow checks all of that ego at the door and becomes entirely absorbed in his characters. He has been and continues to be one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America. Among his many excellent works, Eustace Chisholm is the fullest-bodied, the best written, the most tautly narrated, and the most beautifully constructed. There are very few better postwar American novels, and I don’t know of any other novel of similar quality that is more defiantly itself. I love this book, and it’s a great honor to be able to select it for the Fadiman Award.